Let's Shake Things Up A Bit!

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»Sara hat mir erzählt, dass sie das Gezeter ihrer Mutter leid ist…« – “Sara told me that she is tired of her mother’s nagging.” This sentence comes from the children’s book Das Cafe-geheimnis (it was originally written in Swedish and stars Lasse and Maja) and introduced me to both the word das Gezeter, which will be treated in a subsequent post, and the verb-adjective combination leid sein.

On Duden I found this entry for leid sein. It offers the definition “someone is/has grown tired of something” – » jemandes, einer Sache überdrüssig sein« – and this sample sentence »ich bin sein dummes Gequatsche leid.« – “I’m sick of your blathering.” Clearly this is an important concept as there are a fair few synonyms given in this entry, and they range from the colloquial to the idiomatic to the rather formal:

genug haben –” to have enough”müde sein – “to be tired (of)”satthaben – “”to have had a bellyful”
satt sein; (gehoben) – “to be fed up” (satt sein is used to mean that you have had enough to eat)überdrüssig sein; (umgangssprachlich) – “to be tired of/weary of”
bis obenhin haben – “to have had it up to here”
dick haben/kriegen – “to be fed up” (literally something like “to have or get [it] thickly)
die Nase voll haben – “to be sick of something” (literally “to have a nose full”)langen – “to be enough” (it can also mean “to reach” and in its transitive form “to pass, to hand”) reichen – “to be sufficient” (like langen, it can also mean “to reach” and “to hand”)überhaben; (salopp) –”to be fed up with something” ( literally “to over-have”)stinkenMir stinkt es! – “to be fed up” (it can also mean “to stink”)den Kanal/die Schnauze voll haben – “to have had enough” (literally “to have a canal or snout full “), with Kanal, it can also mean “to be sloshed” something that happens when one has “had enough” to drink and puts one in mind of the literal meaning of a canal overrunning its banks.

Many of these can be made even stronger by adding gründlich – “thoroughly” – as in etwas gründlich satthaben – “to be sick to death of something or someone” or “to be fed up to to the back teeth with something .” (One can also add the word die Faxen – “nonsense” or “shenanigans” – as in Ich habe die Faxen satt.) I don’t think I’d ever given much thought to the expression “to be fed up” before. On seeing the various translations, though, I was startled to see how many of them are related to the consumption of food: “a bellyful,” ” to be fed [up],” “back teeth” and even “to be sick of,” as something one is “sick of” can be something that one doesn’t want to eat again. Perhaps that might be that one is “fed up” with something then that thing is what one can no longer “stomach?!”